The Italian Consortium consists of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Consip S.p.A., Intercent-ER, CSI-Piemonte, InfoCamere and AVCP.

Ministry of Economy and Finance

As responsible for coordinating Italian public expenditure, the MEF achieved a wide experience in successfully managing a national Programme for the Rationalization of Public Expenditure, heavily leveraging on eProcurement tools and standards.

In consideration of the economical national landscape, characterized by a great deal of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) the participation of the Ministry of Finance (MEF) in PEPPOL aims to support them in order to increase their operational efficiency and let them achieve cost reductions and faster payments.
Of course, this requires the availability for SMEs of an accessible infrastructure at reasonable costs that has the lowest impact on internal business processes.
For this reason, the Ministry of Economy and Finance is also committed to carrying on an harmonisation process through an enormous impulse to convergence towards common global standards.

Consip S.p.A.

Consip is the Central Purchasing body (CPB) of Italian Public Administrations. Consip has also the task to manage the whole ICT system of the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, which is its sole shareholder.

With a permanent staff of 500, in its activity as CPB, Consip relies heavily on eProcurement tools; in 2002 Consip was entrusted by the Ministry with the setting-up and management of the eMarketplace for Public Administrations (MEPA), created by Italian Law DPR101/2002 for introducing eProcurement procedures for purchases below EU thresholds.
The participation of Consip in PEPPOL is mainly aimed at:

• avoiding that proprietary standards become incompatible with EU-wide standards, building barriers to Italian economic operators and especially SMEs (which are the target beneficiary of the MEPA)
• creating interfaces between the existing Consip solution and other IT solutions supporting Contracting Authorities and Economic Operators, for exchanging standardized eCatalogues, eOrders and eInvoicing.

Intercent-ER

Intercent-ER, “Agenzia regionale per lo sviluppo dei mercati telematici (“Regional Agency for the electronic markets development”) was established in 2005 and is totally funded by the Emilia Romagna Region. Intercent-ER offers eProcurement and IT services to the Region-owned health service companies and to other regional administrations (municipalities, universities, schools, provinces, public companies). The services provided by Intercent-ER are eCatalogues, based on framework agreements, market place, eTenders, eAuctions, etc. In all the services the documents are exchanged via web with an extensive usage of eSignature. Since 2005, about more than 200 catalogues have been established, involving 650 administrations and hundreds of suppliers; about 10.000 transactions took place, developing a volume of about € 1,8 billions.
Participating in PEPPOL, Intercent-ER intends to reach several goals, such as:

• sharing experience and technical solutions with other similar organizations, in order to improve  the system now applied by the Agency;
• extending the usage of eCatalogue, in order to optimize the purchasing processes;
• improving the standardization and the simplification of the tender procedures at European level, in order to enhance the capabilities of Emilia-Romagna suppliers to participate to EU tenders and in order to increase the possibilities of local PA’s to enlarge the participation of suppliers.

At operational level, Intercent-ER, intends to push the use of standardized eCatalogues and to develop a regional model of eInvoicing, in order to fully complete the dematerialization of procurement cycle. In particular, the Agency intends to:

• extend the number of documents that can be easily de-materialised regardless of where the supplier resides;
• support the access of local enterprises (particularly SMEs) to pan-European markets.

CSI-Piemonte

CSI-Piemonte (Consortium for Information Systems) is a public ICT Consortium working with local public administrations in order to improve services for citizens and companies. Since 1977, CSI-Piemonte has promoted innovation in local public governments through the use of the most modern information technology and Internet tools.

Thanks to its contribution, the Piedmont region operates on the Italian and international scene as an integrated administrative system equipped with shared technological infrastructures and digital platforms. CSI-Piemonte is one of the 15 leading software and information service companies in Italy, with six offices operating in the region and 64 Consortium members. This simplifies its communications with organizations, citizens and enterprises and enables it to offer simple, efficient services contributing to re-launch the regional economy.

The CSI-Piemonte’s participation in Peppol is mainly focused on:

• defining the possible standardization eProcurement solutions (processes and technology), respecting the existing ones, passing through the knowledge and best practices sharing belonging to all European public actors, coming from different countries.
• becoming one of the forerunner in cross border eProcurement in particular for Piedmont PA.

CSI-Piemonte considers the standardization of processes and format through Europe as a potential key to simplify the access to public tenders for suppliers with particular reference to SMEs. With PEPPOL project, because of the inclusion of the overall public procurement process till invoicing, there is the highly potential possibility for a CA to computerize the entire process creating lots of saving, for both CAs and Eos, and achieving a higher level of non-discrimination of suppliers in tenders.

InfoCamere

InfoCamere created and currently operates the national system linking Italy’s 104 Chambers of Commerce and 300 branch offices through a high-speed, high-security electronic network. This efficient system provides immediate access to the Italian Business Register of Companies. The register lists documents and data managed by the “Chambers” as Registration Authorities implementing specific legislative provisions.

The Business Register, with 5.8 million entries, represents the core information infrastructure for the management of the most important events in the life of business entities. From April 2000 to mid 2007 InfoCamere has also been a Government accredited Certification Authority, releasing ID certificates for strong authentication and digital signatures.

InfoCamere has always been active in areas that are of particular importance to e-Government programmes, such as the deployment of modern technologies and the streamlining of bureaucratic procedures to the benefit of businesses and citizens Infocamere has been the founding member of the EBR – European Business Register Network moving into the consortium a comprehensive set of supporting actions.

Presently, InfoCamere operates as technology partner and Business Register domain expert within the BRITE Project. Infocamere is also co-ordinating the initiatives for the exploitation of the XBRL technology within national and international projects. To exploit and enhance the results generated through the Brite project in the action dedicated to the Common Business Dossier, Infocamere works to the implementation of the PEPPOL Virtual Company Dossier (VCD), running a pilot on electronic attestations. The VCD shall enable Economic Operators to collect business certificates and attestations from existing registries and sources for cross-border submission to Contracting Authorities in Europe through the compilation and delivery of electronic packages.

The objective is to run a comprehensive set of actions in the VCD area of operation :

• Analyse the existing context from the organizational, legal and technical perspective
• Identify and draw different evolutionary scenarios by defining different stages of maturity for the VCD
• Produce and maintain the Italian ontology for the VCD mapping activities
• Specify the functions that will give implementation to the national pilot
• Introduce a governance policy to run the service
• Run the VCD service over the implemented pilot

In PEPPOL, Infocamere contributes to improve the reliability of electronic documents presented to a Contracting Authority in a way that is compliant with the national legislation by inclusion of digital signatures.

The objective is to design and implement a new set of functions to extend the current digital  signature services in use by a large base of economic operators in Italy. The task will integrate the actions leading to the production of the Virtual Company Dossier  (VCD) with e-signature services in compliance with the EU standards.

The services on such pilot will support:

• e-signing on outgoing documents
• e-verifying on incoming  signed documents.

AVCP - Authority for the Supervision of Public Contracts

AVCP (Autorità per la Vigilanza sui Contratti Pubblici di lavori, servizi e forniture) is the Italian independent body appointed to monitor the entire public procurement system, in order to grant the respect of the principles of the Treaty in awarding procedures and the effectiveness and efficiency in the execution of contracts regarding public works, services and supplies.

The  AVCP Observatory - ICT department is in charge of the development and procurement of the systems and services aimed at  the collection and processing of data on the Italian public procurement market. It manages the National Database on Public Contracts, which constitutes the basis for the statistical analysis performed by the AVCP Market Analysis Observatory department and for the supervising and regulation activities of the Authority.

AVCP decided to participate in the Virtual Company Dossier WP of PEPPOL to exploit the synergies between the standardization process and some her own ongoing projects – mainly those aimed at enabling the exchange of certificates about technical and financial qualification between the Economic Operators and  the Contracting Authorities exclusively based on the use of electronic means.